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Wednesday, 02 August 2006 03:01 |
 | | Marc Mullinax |
?®Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes. But those who remember their past too closely are condemned to relive them.?∆
?± George Santayana
?ÿ
SEOUL, South Korea ?± ?®What goes around comes around.?∆
?®Be sure your sins will find you out.?∆
?®We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.?∆
These
truisms we trot out show the trend of the human spirit to infuse the
world with a sense of fairness. No matter the faith-name, within each
religion of this world is a mechanism armed and ready to prevent
time-travel escapes/escapades from our responsibilities. We may easily
put geographic distance between ourselves and our pasts, but we think
it a moral imperative that we cannot escape time. We will pay the piper
for what we??ve done, or left undone.
Every religious
expression has developed substantial vocabularies whereby it can
express the response-abilities we accumulate through free-will based
living. Further, each faith feels human beings are better off for our
morality sourced in free-will decision-making. None advocates an
abdication of responsibility, save that there be consequences.
Consequences. We
want the things we do/don??t do to count for something, to convey some
larger meaning, to create a moral weight that extends beyond the day.
The critical question, Carl Jung asked, is how personal this moral
weight is to be regarded. Do my actions alone affect me, or am I caught
in other morality plays, unable to escape the interconnecting web of
rewards earned and punishments inflicted by others?
This weight from
our pasts is expressed most comprehensively in Buddhism and Hinduism.
?®Karma?∆ (fate-making action) conveys the recurring weight of the past
that ?± like a dog and its vomit, a criminal and his crime scene ?± we
ever-return to meet. Most of the time we are wake-walking our way
through life, and we??re so accustomed to the pain of our pasts that we
hardly feel them anymore. (Freud said that alcohol helps.) But there is
a cost to such anodynes.
Such was brought
home to me in the film ?®Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374546/) by Korean director Ki-duk Kim. A
young boy raised by a Buddhist monk in an isolated area captures and
then ties strings around a fish, a frog and a snake. Then he ties
stones to the other ends of the strings. Only the frog survives the
cruelty. The boy is punished at first (and throughout the movie) by
having to liberate that which he has killed, or else he must tie to his
back a stone to atone for his destructive ways. Do we not each of us
carry around stones from the past that weigh us down?
There??s
something satisfying in this view that ?®each tub must sit on its own
bottom.?∆ Most of us, when pushed, do not mind paying for our own
mindless acts or inactions. The rub comes when my actions or neglectful
behavior causes problems for someone else. Were I were to drink, drive
and cause the death or injury of another person, am I contributing to
the victim??s karma? Expressing my own? Does ?®what goes around comes
around?∆ fully explain?
?®Ca-ca happens?∆ but ?®Grace happens,?∆ too. Why?
When can we know that the ca-ca happening involves my personal history, and when is such the universe playing with dice?
Karma and its
related concepts in our religions do keep the unruly in check. It makes
for good teaching to children, may help rein in criminal behavior, and
stimulate graceful, selfless actions. But is karma a human invention
alone, or is there something to it??∆ And when does it break down? In
other words, is there such a thing as grace?
?ÿ
Dr. Marc S.
Mullinax, chairman of the philosophy and religion departments at Mars
Hill College, can be reached at mmullinax-at-mhc.edu.
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